Dave Pollard at How to Save the World, about the difference between the business done by big profit-for-shareholders driven companies, and that done by small, networked "natural" corporations that do things that actually need to be done.

Hierarchical Corporation's Offerings:Advantages to the Customer

Natural Enterprise's Offerings:

Advantages to the Customer

Recognized, popular brand (a salve for low self-esteem)

Low price (possible because of massive government subsidies and favours like 'free' trade agreements)

Resilience (reliability in the face of economic or other crises, due to superior improvisational capacity and focus on effectiveness rather than more vulnerable efficiency)

Quality and durability (no crap from indifferent Chinese factories)

Appeal to altruism (supplier is good to its people, its community, its environment, and good for the local economy)

Or, summarized well here:

Large, multinational, hierarchical corporations are not designed to provide customer service. They are designed to maximize margin and profit for senior executives and major corporate shareholders, by charging the customer as much as possible and giving them as little as possible. Under their charter (and under threat of dismissal or legal charges if they defy it) they can do nothing else; they are tied to this model of operation and decision-making. Worse, they have to grow each year or die. The model is inherently unsustainable, and Fortune 500 companies all, inevitably, crash and burn.

All Natural Enterprises need to do is focus on meeting customers' evolving unmet needs effectively. Talk to anyone who is buying from a small business with no growth aspirations, instead of from a 'competing' large hierarchical corporation, and in so many words they will tell you that is why. The chart at the top of this page summarizes the 10 enormous advantages a Natural Enterprise has over a hierarchical corporation, when it ignores all the absurd conventional wisdom (about growth, external financing, advertising, huge risk, endless struggle, the need to do everything yourself etc.) and just focuses on meeting customers' evolving unmet needs effectively.

As my book explains, doing this takes a lot of work, but it is low-risk, low-stress, low-cost, joyful work. It is the antithesis of what most people do (even those who should know better) when they actually start to establish their own business.

And this needs to be pointed out often:

There is no 'open market' or 'free market'. We live in the most tightly-controlled oligopolistic economy in history. These oligopolies buy politicians (and hence subsidies and favours), corner supply, buy up competitors to eliminate competition, and blanket the media with an unprecedented and relentless flood of propaganda called 'advertising'. We don't want to compete in that market, and we don't want to 'expand'. Growth is unsustainable, period. What we do instead is outmaneuver. We're better off starting businesses wherever there is a significant, researched, evolved unmet customer need that we have the competencies, knowledge and resources to fill. Every sector, every market has lots of them.

So, the anti-dote is to find unmet needs and meet them better and more efficiently than a large uncaring corporation can. Do that in every area, and network well.

The Hierarchical one excludes the magic of human exchange, based on merely keeping the functionality going (with switched off mind).

The Natural Enterprize type is dependent on initiative, pleasantness of human exchanges, a feel good factor from 9 to 5 likened to another sort of wealth which stores of its own accord, and could be said to be the stuff to make bird song in the mornings and the world generally go round. This is the give factor (not the take one). Reliant on good relations.

26 Jul 2006 @ 01:04 by ming : DifferenceA key difference, I think, like the title says, is whether it is an open (free) market or not. The natural enterprise would be about noticing a need and freely choosing to try to fill it, and it succeeds if one does good work, and gives people what they need and want for a reasonable price. I.e. free market. One chooses the best available offer. Whereas the hierarchical thing is not about that. It is about manipulating the market so that one has as much (unfair) advantage as possible, so that people get locked into one's product, the product one has chosen to produce, not necessarily what they really need and want, and one manipulates the mind of the public through advertising and secrecy about what you really are producing and how, so that people will buy what you want them to buy, whether it is in their best interest or not. One is about offering and choosing the best solution. The other is about coercing people into choosing the solution you profit most from, so you can offer the least possible value for the highest possible price, preferably without anybody noticing.

2 Aug 2006 @ 23:17 by taranga @80.168.196.59 : shackled marketsJust aeen 'who killed the electric car' a brilliant expose of how the corporate/political power structure manipulates us all to the detrement of the whole planet.

12 Sep 2006 @ 16:11 by Lionel David @82.233.109.205 : new crowdsourcing initiativeIn the same way of that article, look at my project which aims to build the first "crowdsourcing" company [link]

1 May 2016 @ 10:49 by Cactus @188.143.232.32 : uKxCPKDylRyThikning like that is really amazing